Huge? Verify. Flashy? Roger. Highly effective? Positively. That’s Acer’s flagship Predator Orion 7000 gaming desktop (begins at $3,799.99; $4,299.99 as examined) in a nutshell. Nothing is refined about our all-out check unit, from its tempered-glass case to its liquid-cooled CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 card. As quick as it’s, nonetheless, this Predator would not fairly catch the Editors’ Selection-award-winning Corsair Vengeance i7400 or the MSI Infinite RS thirteenth, which stay our high selections on this elite tier. Unique type and options nonetheless make the Acer short-list-worthy, particularly if yow will discover it on sale.
The Design: Gamer All of the Manner
Tempered glass and RGB lighting are mainstays of high-end gaming desktops, and the Predator Orion 7000 has them to spare. The present begins with a dramatic entrance panel that extends proper out of the tower, housing two turbine-like 120mm consumption followers.
Perforations across the sides of the protrusion permit airflow. You will discover no detachable mud filters right here, however as an alternative a pull-out one below the tower for the facility provide.
At 19.1 by 8.6 by 19.9 inches (HWD), the Predator is bulkier than the Corsair Vengeance i7400 (18.4 by 9.1 by 17.8 inches) and the MSI Infinite RS thirteenth (18.7 by 8.5 by 16.5 inches). Its metallic and glass building feels strong and would not creak or flex. A devoted handhold on the rear is an actual asset for heaving it out of its transport field.
The Predator’s entrance ports embrace 4 5Gbps USB connectors (one Kind-C, three Kind-A), an audio combo jack, and a microphone jack. The facility button sits alongside the highest of the protrusion. Concerning the audio jack, Acer notably features a DTS:X Headphone license, which tunes the sound to particular headphones.
A number of inches again from the entrance ports is a hot-swap drive bay, one thing sometimes solely seen in workstations. Urgent its launch button pops out the two.5-inch caddy, toaster-fashion. Its USB-C connector permits it to be related to different PCs for quick knowledge switch.
Round again, the motherboard accommodates one 20Gbps USB-C port, three 5Gbps USB-A ports, two retro USB 2.0 ports, 2.5Gbps Killer Ethernet, and three audio jacks (microphone, line-in, and line-out). The GeForce RTX 4090 GPU has one HDMI 2.1 and three DisplayPort video outputs. You will additionally discover Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 courtesy of an Intel AX211 wi-fi card; its antennas are constructed into the case.
Acer bundles better-than-average peripherals with the Predator Orion 7000. The Predator USB keyboard’s membrane keys aren’t as exact as mechanical switches, however are quiet and lined in a pleasing soft-touch coating. The keyboard emits a number of ranges of backlighting, has flip-out ft for adjusting the typing angle, and options devoted media-playback keys at higher proper.
In the meantime, the right-handed Predator mouse has two left-side buttons, a sculpted thumb relaxation, and a DPI change behind the notched mouse wheel. It match my medium-size hand effectively, although I’d have appreciated to see an ambidextrous mouse included as an alternative.
Case Lighting: How Brilliant Is Too Brilliant?
The Predator Orion 7000 has six lighting zones managed by the Acer PredatorSense app, three of that are the entrance and rear 120mm followers. The opposite three are the graphics card, a number of LED clusters on the motherboard, and the CPU-cooling waterblock.
Eight ARGB LEDs in every 120mm fan create dazzling results, particularly the “fluid magic” preset that concurrently illuminates the blades in a number of colours. The multi-LED waterblock is able to related results. In the meantime, the vertically mounted RTX 4090 card has two multi-LED gentle bars, plus light-up GeForce RTX lettering.
You will additionally discover motherboard LED clusters behind the VRM heatsinks, below the waterblock, and flanking the RAM slots, however they’re merely uncovered LEDs, and piercingly vibrant ones at that. I ended up turning them off. (Doing so is achieved in a roundabout means by deciding on a “no brightness” shade.) Oddly, PredatorSense would not present brightness controls; when you’ll come throughout loads of preconfigured results, really customized LED configuration would have been higher. At the very least the app helps you to retailer your settings as profiles.
The Inside: Packing Critical Warmth
For servicing, the PC’s tempered-glass facet door comes off by eradicating two Phillips screws (not thumbscrews) and sliding a latch. The door abruptly swings outward however would not fall flat; it must be lifted away.
A top-mounted 240mm radiator cools the Intel Core i9-13900KF CPU. Acer’s MicroATX (9.6-inch-square) motherboard is predicated on the Intel Z790 chipset to help CPU overclocking. That is the most important board that matches on this tower, as you will discover no standoffs for something bigger. The board has one M.2 solid-state drive slot beneath the CPU waterblock (occupied, however not lined by a heatsink) and yet one more extending off the motherboard to the best of the 4 DIMM slots. The included RAM sticks have metallic Predator-branded heatsinks. (Given the quantity of RGB lighting on this tower, I discover it odd additionally they aren’t illuminated.)
The motherboard’s enlargement slots embrace two PCI Specific x16 slots and one x1 slot, although that is on paper; the vertically mounted graphics card takes the highest x16 slot by way of riser cable and blocks entry to the others. In addition to exhibiting off the GPU, vertical mounting eliminates the chance of stress {that a} heavy graphics card can placed on the motherboard. For further energy, the cardboard’s metallic help bracket is screwed into the three.5-inch drive cage. Two slide-out caddies within the latter make drive swapping easy.
This case would not home the facility provide or the three.5-inch drive cage in a separate compartment, as an alternative placing each in plain sight. The 1,200-watt energy provide seems like a top-notch unit, with totally modular cables and an 80 Plus Platinum (92%) effectivity score.
Testing the Acer Predator Orion 7000: Benching With the Finest
Our $4,299.99 Predator Orion 7000 evaluation unit includes a Core i9-13900KF processor (eight Efficiency and 16 Environment friendly cores, as much as 5.8GHz turbo), 32GB of DDR5 RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, a 1TB SSD with Home windows 11 Professional, and a 2TB exhausting drive. Acer’s customary guarantee is one 12 months. That is the highest mannequin; Acer additionally sells a step-down $3,799.99 configuration with a Core i7-13700K and a GeForce RTX 4080.
Acer fees a light premium for its flagship, as I comparison-shopped a Corsair Vengeance i7400 for $3,949.99 and an MSI Infinite RS thirteenth for $4,199, every with twice the RAM (64GB) and SSD storage (2TB). Even a ten% off sale might shift economics in Acer’s favor, although.
We pitted the Predator Orion 7000 in opposition to essentially the most potent gaming towers we have examined, together with not solely the abovementioned MSI and Corsair however the monstrous Cooler Grasp Cosmos Infinity thirtieth Anniversary Version and the boutique-built Origin Millennium 5000D. All use a variant of the Core i9-13900K (in Origin’s case, the particular 6.0GHz Core i9-13900KS) and a GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, so this needs to be a battle of small percentages.
Productiveness and Content material Creation Checks
We run the identical basic productiveness benchmarks throughout each cellular and desktop methods. Our first check is UL’s PCMark 10, which simulates quite a lot of real-world productiveness and workplace workflows to measure general system efficiency and in addition features a storage subtest for the first drive.
Our different three benchmarks deal with the CPU, utilizing all obtainable cores and threads, to charge a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 makes use of that firm’s Cinema 4D engine to render a fancy scene, whereas Geekbench 5.4 Professional from Primate Labs simulates fashionable apps starting from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine studying. Lastly, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to transform a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p decision (decrease instances are higher).
Lastly, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Techniques, which makes use of the Artistic Cloud model 22 of Adobe’s well-known picture editor to charge a PC’s efficiency for content material creation and multimedia purposes. It is an automatic extension that executes quite a lot of basic and GPU-accelerated Photoshop duties starting from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving a picture to making use of masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Predator began in the back of the pack in the principle PCMark 10 check. It is little doubt a quick machine—we take into account something greater than 4,000 factors an indication {that a} PC is well-suited for on a regular basis productiveness apps like Phrase and Excel—however the Origin was extra 1,000 factors forward of the Acer.
The Predator additionally trailed within the CPU-specific assessments, particularly Cinebench, and in Photoshop. The Core i9-13900K is a notoriously power-hungry and hot-running chip, however it’s as much as the system builder to cope with that; probably Acer toned down the Orion’s energy profile so it would not get too scorching. Both means, it would not push the bounds of the CPU like the opposite desktops.
Graphics and Gaming Checks
For gaming desktops, we run each artificial and real-world gaming benchmarks. The previous contains two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, the extra modest Night time Raid (appropriate for methods with built-in graphics) and extra demanding Time Spy (appropriate for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We then run two OpenGL workouts, rendered offscreen by the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which permits for various native show resolutions; extra frames per second (fps) means increased efficiency.
Our actual gaming benchmarks are these constructed into F1 2021, Murderer’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, examined at increased resolutions and high quality settings to symbolize simulation, open-world action-adventure, and aggressive/esports shooter video games respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice every at Extremely high quality (at each 1080p and 4K), whereas F1 2021 is run at 4K with and with out AMD and Nvidia’s performance-boosting FSR and DLSS options turned on.
Echoing what we noticed within the CPU assessments, the Acer’s scores within the largely CPU-limited 3DMark assessments and our 1080p and 1440p sport benchmarks took a again seat, although issues evened out on the GPU-intensive 4K decision; the Predator even took first place in Murderer’s Creed. On that notice, the explanation you’d pay the massive bucks for an RTX 4090 and even RTX 4080 desktop is to play video games at 4K, so in that sense the Orion’s lesser CPU efficiency is not a deal-breaker.
The Predator does have a technique to recoup a few of its efficiency shortcomings: by way of the CPU overclocking constructed into the PredatorSense app. Enabling the Turbo setting, I noticed the system’s Cinebench rating improve by 4.6% (from 27,750 to 29,051 factors), whereas 3DMark Time Spy rose 2.6% (from 30,913 to 31,715). It is principally getting one thing for nothing, however the minimal positive aspects aren’t well worth the great roar from the cooling followers at full pace. The Predator’s regular fan noise may be very effectively managed.
Verdict: Extra Vroom for the Bucks, Please
Acer’s Predator Orion 7000 is a good entry within the high-end gaming house. We like its tempered-glass case and in depth RGB lighting, and particularly its modern hot-swap drive bay. Sadly, this large tower’s efficiency falls wanting the mark set by our class favorites the Corsair Vengeance i7400 and the MSI Infinite RS thirteenth. It is nonetheless greater than able to satisfying 4K gameplay, however each benchmark level counts at this stage. However, this Predator might grow to be a favourite with a value lower.
